Greetings from the land of the lazy . . . . it is now really time to hang up the hat and quit my day job in the waste industry. Looking forward to my last daily commute of 60 miles and just pottering about from home. (turned 61 this year). Looking for stuff to keep me occupied, and CAD from home is definitely on the cards. But I won't pay for AutoCAD. (yes, I know it can be copied *free* but want to consider legal options available today). I might run classes for the older guys in my neighborhood who want to convert from pencil to CAD and that must be on a CAD system than can be publically advertised and endorsed. (Our city now requires building plans to be submitted electronically and that has caught the older architects on the wrong foot)

So, are there any generic freeware AutoCAD lookalikes out there today? (I still only work in 2D with very basic commands - which is fine for teaching newbies to CAD)

Draftsight is free as an Autocad replacement, used it for a while until I got a free licence for Autocad 2016. Also, while not CAD per se Fusion 360 is a great tool to creating stuff in plus it has CAM features as well.

I will add another vote for draftsight. I did CAD design on ACAD starting at version 8 and stopped using it altogether sometime around version 14. The think I really like about draftsight is it's command compatability with ACAD. All the single letter shortcuts I used to use in ACAD work in draftsight. The only real weakness it has is it does not have any proper 3d capability but for 2d drafting I have found it the most productive solution for me.

I like that DraftSight, set to Classic mode, gives me the same look and feel as AutoCAD. Having used AutoCAD daily for about 30 years, I use it without thinking. I have successfully taught AutoCAD to many people, but it isn't an affordable system out here where minimum wage is about $4 an hour. I can teach AutoCAD, or an exact equivalent . . . . I don't want to learn another CAD just for the sake of teaching it.

I have used draftsight for a few years and never had an activation issue but there are a couple of things that come to mind and may be worth trying if you have not already.
1) Turn of the windows firewall if on whilst trying to activate.
2) Make sure the user you are logged in as has full admin rights.

I started with Autocad however now I do everything in Rhino. Easy to pick up if you already know Autocad and it can export to most of the known popular most expensive systems. I bought it straight from McNeel however it can be gotten for less from distributors like Novedge.